Julia Kristeva

Abstract

Julia Kristeva (b. 24 June 1941) is chiefly known for her work as a theorist, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and creative writer. Her works examine complex issues of language, politics, and philosophy. She was born in Bulgaria and moved to France in 1965. In the 1960s, she became an active member of the Tel Quel group (English translation, “as is” or “as such”), founded by Philippe Sollers, whom Kristeva married in 1967. She was trained in psychoanalysis and earned her degree in 1979. Her training and degree in psychoanalysis in 1979 led her to formulate ideas and theories on a continuum from such disparate thinkers as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and sociologist Lucien Goldmann, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has been regarded as a key exponent of French feminism, along with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Among the early interests of structuralism, in addition to Marxism, was the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Her first published works, Semeiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969) and Le Texte du roman (1970), blended and built upon the work of Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Charles S. Peirce. Kristeva expounded a theoretical framework that would be more fully developed in the text Révolution du langage poétique (1974) (Revolution in poetic language, 1984). Her early interest in the politics of language led to the publication of Semeiotikè (1969) and Révolution du langage poétique (1974). Kristeva received her doctorate in linguistics in 1973 from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Practical School of Advanced Studies). Her doctoral dissertation, La Révolution du Langage Poétique (1974; partial translation, Revolution in Poetic Language), was acclaimed for employing psychoanalytic theory in language and literature. Her early work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), is about the power of revolutionary poetry to yoke the semiotic content of language with the symbolic dimension to produce signification that has the potential to work for political change. Patterns and rhythms bring about a provocative perspective on its representational content, and thereby it has the potential to work for political change. Her work, Revolution in Poetic Language, established her as a major poststructuralist thinker, especially for its explorations of new areas of discourse, the semiotic and the symbolic. The work conceptualized the speaking being as one always subject to the revolutionary power of the affective aspects of language, that is, the semiotic component, which, with the symbolic element, creates signification. Kristeva emphasizes the revolutionary aspect of poetry: that poetry can harness the semiotic content of language—its sounds and rhythms—to bring about a subversive perspective on its symbolic content, thereby having the potential to work for political change. As a leading thinker, critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, novelist, and feminist, Kristeva’s position is uncontested.